If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (107 page)

As the buses left the women turned and were horrified to see what Jean described as: ‘a high earthen embankment fitted with gun emplacements and guns trained on the camp’. Like others who had left before them they now understood that the SS really had planned to destroy the camp and everyone in it.

Jean’s convoy moved off into the night. The drivers told the women that there was a risk of attack from Allied fighters: many German military vehicles were using the roads and many were being hit. As night fell the rescue trucks drove with no lights, but luckily there was a full moon. For safety’s sake, they split up: one group of vehicles headed north on the Wismar road, the other went south via Schwerin.

Jean was on the Schwerin road, and as the convoy moved close to the front line, word came that there could be an attack at any minute. The buses pulled off the road into the thick of a wood, and the women watched tanks and cannon go past on the main road ahead. ‘The sky is as bright as day and we hear the explosions of bombs and rumble of the guns, but nothing matters to us as we are alive and approaching freedom,’ wrote Jean. As they waited in the darkness, the women talked to their Danish protectors, who told them it was touch and go whether the Red Cross buses would be able to come for them.

When dawn broke the convoy moved off again. All was well. The fighter planes had moved away for now, but a few hours later they had to stop again, and this time the drivers told all the women to get out fast and take cover in the bushes alongside the road.

There are planes on the way and we are going to be attacked. We are too slow to take cover, as we don’t really believe it. They urge us on, telling us we are in real danger, but we are sceptical because we have noticed that it
is usually factories that are bombed and not the concentration camps. So why fear that a Red Cross column will be attacked? Nobody had told us that the Germans use red crosses as cover for their own transports.

Crawling and helping each other, the women reached the bushes. Jean lay under a bush with two other women, and a little further on she saw two more take cover under another bush. Planes appeared and dived lower and lower,

and suddenly we are machine-gunned
. Through the roar of the planes we can hear the whistling bullets raining down on us. The shots pass so close to me that one singes my hair. For a moment I taste the bitter irony of being killed by our own Allies on the road to freedom, and they are gone and I live. Looking around I see a terrible scene. Behind me a woman is bleeding to death. A bright red stream of blood is pouring out of her in gushes. Her lips are bluish white and her eyes break as I look at her.

Another woman has a small hole-like burn in her dress where she has been shot through the breast. There are many victims. Blood and pieces of flesh are everywhere but we are quiet and calm. There’s no screaming or moaning. We have to act, and quickly, for the drivers tell us they will be back to attack us again. And so it happens, there is another attack, but it’s not so bad this time. When it’s all over we put the corpses together on one truck, along with the wounded.

Further on down the road the convoy reached a French POW camp, where the White Buses were able to stop safely. The drivers and SS staff were traumatised and new vehicles and new drivers were sent for. The women waited, talking to the French POWs, who were astonished by their appearance and asked who they were and where they were going. They said they were going to Sweden with the Swedish Red Cross, and the Frenchmen laughed. ‘You’ll never make it. You’re surrounded on all sides and you’ll end up in the firing line of our own side.’

Hours later the relief buses arrived. Early next morning Jean’s convoy crossed the Danish border and the women saw the Red Cross camp. ‘People are smiling and waving at us. We are indescribably happy. They feed us porridge and hot milk.’ The Danish flag, however, flew at half-mast. The second convoy that took the Wismar road to the north had also been attacked, and at least ten women killed.

How many died on the Schwerin road convoy nobody knew, or ever would. Some reports say nine women died, some say seventeen. Jean Bommezijn de Rochement said at the time that there might have been far more. The Danish convoy leader, Gösta Hallqvist, was also seriously injured,
and one driver killed, a Canadian called Eric Ringman. Ringman was buried at the Red Cross camp in Denmark, and a Norwegian seamen’s pastor said prayers over his grave. Then the women and their drivers and helpers headed on to Sweden.
After a further Swedish protest
, Sir Victor Mallet, British ambassador in Stockholm, telegraphed London reporting a number of deaths in three attacks that day ‘by low-flying British aircraft’ on Red Cross convoys from Ravensbrück. ‘Nobody knows the nationalities but it is possible that among them were British and American women.’

News of the slaughter on the Schwerin road reached the camp, but it meant little to those still hoping to leave on the next Swedish convoy: they would far rather run the risk of being hit in an air attack than face the prospect of a death march.

All around the camp were the signals that evacuation threatened. Suhren had put a map on his office wall, marking out the route. The last of the documents from the offices were being burned and in the bunker all newly vacated cells were scrubbed, chairs installed and mirrors hung on the walls. In the punishment cells the most important cleaning up was now carried out.

Since the beginning of April, as their work diminished, the
Sonderkommando
– the eleven men who worked on the gassing and burning gang – had been gradually brought into the bunker cells, where they remained locked up until the last of the gassings was carried out. The precise date of the final gassing at Ravensbrück is not known, but Adolf Winkelmann told the Hamburg court that he had gone on selecting for gassing until 24 or 25 April.

Winkelmann’s evidence on the dates ties in with the testimony of several prisoners, and is consistent also with what Mina Lepadies, a Jehovah’s Witness, revealed about the murder of the
Sonderkommando
men in her statement for the 1946 Hamburg trial. Their killing, she said, took place on 25 April, and she described what happened.

Mina worked in the bunker under Margarete Mewes, the chief bunker guard, whom she helped by cleaning and serving the prisoners’ coffee and food. The first Mina knew of anything amiss was when the men were put two to a cell. Then the coffee pot disappeared. ‘I looked all over for it, and when I couldn’t find it I got another. Mewes came with the missing pot and told me to give them their coffee.’

At first, Mina suspected nothing, but some of the men would not drink, so she grew suspicious and stopped taking the coffee round. Mewes took it instead, and those who drank it died. At ten in the morning their bodies were removed. At midday an SS man came with the soup and told Mina to serve it to the men still left alive. She refused, so he served it himself. Two men, those in cell 47, refused to drink the soup, but two in another cell drank it
and by evening they too were dead. That evening Mina was told to serve the soup to the remaining two in cell 47.

So I looked
at the two men in cell 47 and asked if they wanted to eat. They both said: ‘Yes, if it’s you who’s serving it.’ They were very nervous and said that they were going to be executed anyhow. Next morning their cell was empty. Everything had been taken away. There was a hammer on the table and a bloodstain, which someone had tried to cover over with soil, but the bench was covered with bloodstains too, and so were the walls.

Mina was ordered to scrub the cells.

It was also on 25 April that the biggest convoy yet, with twenty Swedish White Buses, finally made it to Ravensbrück to collect more prisoners. Its Swedish mission leader, Åke Svensson, predicted that this would be the last time the buses got through, as conditions on the road were already almost impassable. The buses were fired on again as they approached. At Torgau, 200 miles to the south, Russian and American forces linked up that day, cutting Germany in two.

For the prisoners the day began with an
Appell
for all remaining French and Belgians, and the Poles were brought out in groups, mothers and babies first. ‘
We were suddenly told
to bring our dressed babies onto the camp square,’ said Stefania Wodzynska, who carried her baby girl Wanda, two months old. The women were told they were going to Sweden and they saw the Swedish Red Cross vehicles already waiting beyond the gates.

Stasia Tkaczyk was here too, carrying Waldmar, who was just twelve days old. Stasia, aged eighteen, like many of the mothers, had arrived at the camp the previous September after the Warsaw Uprising. Back then, knowing that she was already two months pregnant, she decided to save herself and her baby by concealing her pregnancy. She was sent to the Königsberg subcamp, where she worked on the frozen airstrip. In February, six months pregnant but still undetected, she joined the death march back to Ravensbrück. She was selected to work in a munitions factory near Berlin, twelve hours a day on a diet of cabbage soup, and sleeping in a cellar as the bombs dropped. In March she passed out at work and was sent to Ravensbrück again, where Czech nurses cared for her in the
Revier
. On 13 April, Waldmar was born. He was very sick, and now Stasia stood with him in her arms, wrapped in rags, waiting for the buses.

Svensson, the transport leader, recalled that as the day wore on the selections for the buses got more and more confused, and negotiations for places out of hand, so that in the end ‘
we took everybody we could
without asking’. The biggest argument was over the rabbits. Suhren had not obeyed his orders
to shoot them, but when the Swede asked him to hand them over he refused. At least three managed to smuggle themselves on board, including the Lublin lawyer Zofia Sokulska.

It was on this convoy of 25 April that the first large group of Ravensbrück’s Jews were taken. In his meeting with Norbert Masur four days earlier Himmler had made his dramatic offer to release 1000 Ravensbrück Jews, and had then increased the offer over breakfast with Bernadotte a few hours later, when he said that ‘all the women of Ravensbrück’ could leave, which meant Jews and non-Jews.

The first the Polish Jewish women knew of this was the previous day, when according to the Siemens worker Basia Zajączkowska, an order was issued that all Polish Jews in the camp should come forward. ‘
We were placed
in the
Strafblock
. No food was available and no access to toilets. We were viciously beaten at the line-up. We suspected they were going to send us to the crematorium, despite rumours of liberation.’ Erna Solewicz, another Polish Jew, remembered a sudden order given in her block that ‘
all Jewish women
had to leave the camp’. The Blockova took them
nach vorne
, where they received a piece of bread and a Red Cross parcel.

Next day the first of these Jewish groups were taken towards the gates. Guards ‘tore off our marks and numbers,’ said Basia. Exactly how many Jewish women left with Bernadotte’s evacuation transports is impossible to say, but it must have far exceeded the 1000 offered by Himmler. Suhren had told Göring there were ‘3000 Jewesses’ in the camp, which meant there were certainly many more. Statements from other prisoners suggest that as many as half of the women taken on the buses were probably Jews, and far more would follow three days later when Franz Göring – miraculously – would announce that he had managed to requisition a train.

Meanwhile, during the scramble for bus places the non-Jewish Poles complained of Jewish women taking places assigned for them. ‘The Jewish women stormed the buses, which meant we couldn’t get in,’ complained one. For their part the Jewish women themselves later complained of being ‘bumped off buses’ and having to fight for places. Frieda Zetler, a Polish nurse who had come from the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz, had been due to travel on one of the earlier buses, but learned later that the bus she had failed to get onto was the one that was bombed. But she made it onto the buses of 25 April instead.

Even the Jewish women themselves often didn’t know if others were Jews or not. In order to conceal the Jewish releases from Hitler, Himmler had ordered they all be disguised as Poles. And as Basia Zającskowska said, they had to tear off their ‘marks and numbers’ before leaving the camp, so as the women embarked on the buses none of them wore triangles that marked them as Jews or as any other group.

Nor was any count attempted on arrival in Sweden: nobody wished to proclaim their Jewish origins after what they had been through. As always in the camp, there were countless women who had never avowed their Jewishness for the same reasons. For example, Maria Rundo, the young Pole who survived the Auschwitz death march, got out on the White Buses, as did the Dutch-Jewish woman Margareta van der Kuit, who had disguised her Jewishness since her arrest in 1943.

When Basia and her Jewish group were finally led out of the camp, each was given a Red Cross parcel. ‘Outside were the White Buses of the Swedish Red Cross. We were free. We could not believe it and tried to make sure by asking the drivers, and even
at the last minute
the guards shouted at us and called us names.’

When the last of the twenty buses began to pull away, the names of the British women had still not been called, raising fears that the threat to hold them as hostages was real. Then, at the very last minute, Fritz Suhren had yet another change of mind. The British were suddenly called up, raising hopes that they too might be released.

Accounts vary of how this came about, but there is little doubt that it was the French prisoner Maisie Renault who first drew the Swedes’ attention to the cases of the British and American women. Maisie had got away on a convoy the previous day, but before leaving she promised her French-American friend Lucienne Dixon, who was left behind, that she would pass on her name to the Swedish drivers, as well as those of other Americans and English, so that they could be collected next time.